Trustless, programmable money. It's useful. The problem centers generally around how useful "trustless" really is. Developed nations usually already have a trusted currency and underdeveloped nations have so many extant corruption issues that trustless money isn't necessarily spendable. The goldilocks zone so far for crypto has been remittances to developing countries, a small market indeed. Crypto's narrow application range is what makes it, so far at least, more hype than bite.

Sure ChatGPT and other LLMs can do all sorts of stuff. It can give you inspiration, help you search through a corpus that hasn't been scraped properly, or just fill in the blanks for laborious writing that was generally a waste of your time. It's lots of fun to play around with. But is that worth enough to offset the R&D, training, compute, and profit costs associated? Are people willing to pay for LLMs at a scale that makes sense? For companies that really need this kind of writing done, is it that much cheaper than hiring an English literature major intern? Can the sorts of "hallucinations" an LLM outputs be tolerated in actual applications?

The two fields suffer from a similar problem. Sure they're breakthroughs, but are they enough to derive broad utility? Regardless I disagree with the premise of Doctorow's post. I think the problem is subtle and not deserving of the silly snark that his post contains as it tried to pick apart banal definitions.

Bitcoin is mainly useful for money laundering... or... er... disagreeing with the government. In other words, removing the middleman. Also, depending on inflation levels, it can be a good storage of value.

All in all, I think it's the most useful technology in the last decade. If you live in a bubble you won't realize that, but it's what it is.